What is a person to think when an evening television news piece about the prescription-drug benefits that would become possible under a new Medicare law turns out not to have been produced by journalists? That piece was "reported," in fact, by a Washington, D.C., public relations firm, which was hired as part of a $124 million campaign by the Bush administration to give its policies a favorable spin in the news media.

What are we then to think when, after the deception is widely publicized (as it was in 2004), the offending government agency apologizes and the PR firm apologizes, but the news media doesn't? Instead, the dozens of TV stations that aired this "news segment" blamed the ethical debacle on everyone else. In the years since, TV stations have continued to air similarly misleading "video news releases" with little or no editing and with only the tiniest identifications of their source.

Is it any wonder, then, that an increasing number of people have turned to the wilds of the Internet -- both to consume and to produce material they consider more interesting, and sometimes more reliable, than what can be found in the rancid ruins of old media?

This dilemma -- the slow death, seemingly by suicide, of a cultural grandfather and its precarious replacement by an energetic, out-of-control adolescent -- is the subject of three timely new books: American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media by Neil Henry (University of California Press; 326 pages; $24.95), We're All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Law in the Internet Age by Scott Gant (Free Press; 240 pages; $26) and The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture by Andrew Keen (228 pages; Doubleday; $22.95).

Together, these books raise vital questions -- and ignore others that are just as central. Coincidentally, each book squats on a different corner of the ideological triangle that has defined the debate over the future of news. Keen takes one side, angrily lambasting today's online "citizen journalists"; Gant takes the opposite corner, extolling these amateurs; and Henry takes the middle corner floating gracefully above the two others, and not just because he has staked out the middle ground. In "American Carnival," by far the most reasoned and well documented of these works, Henry struggles earnestly to reconcile the fiery viewpoints Gant and Keen represent, along with the many other impatient forces in today's media revolution.

And Henry is in the best position of the three authors to do so. A longtime reporter and foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, Henry is now a journalism professor at UC Berkeley. Each day he encounters young, idealistic, would-be professionals who are preparing for a future in an industry he sees in deep chaos, which seems to shed another ethical safeguard every week, and whose business model for tomorrow is still unknown. The carnage of this tragedy is splattered throughout "American Carnival." For instance, Henry regularly hears from former students who, in their first jobs, are being forced to make tawdry choices that Henry's old editors never would have considered. This does not, however, make Henry nostalgic. One of the useful services of his book is its full history of the evolution of American journalism, particularly its long expertise in the art of manipulation.

As worrisome as this portrait may be, it is, unfortunately, not news. Media criticism has never wanted for contributors, and the basic message in all three of these books has been treated abundantly elsewhere, often more thoughtfully. Library shelves are full of superb books on the failings of the press, which has always suffered from its bastard bloodline: an enterprise with high ideals, financed by the commercial interests it is designed to attack. Dissections of the trouble this miserable alliance causes begin, most famously, with A.J. Liebling's 1947 classic, "The Wayward Pressman" (and its many subsequent reiterations); continue with Ben Bagdikian's famous 1983 indictment, "The Media Monopoly" (also frequently updated); and carry on with "Media Circus" (1993) and other works by Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz and "Breaking the News" (1996) by James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly.

More recent additions to this pantheon must deal, of course, with the birth of online news and the Internet's latest hot sideshow: Web logs. Few have done so more expertly than "We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People," a 2004 account by Dan Gillmor, a former columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and now a blogger himself. Curiously, Gillmor (who, like Henry, now teaches journalism at UC Berkeley) covered most of the issues discussed in these three books; he also more fully explained how journalistic principles in today's digital world are being used and abused, then sometimes remade in tougher form.

A brief rundown of these principles may provide the best way to think about the merits and demerits of these books under review -- and why journalism matters at all. At its core, the news business is built around two goals: First, tell important truths in a form that seems intriguing or new. Second, make money doing it. Strangely, all three of these authors ignore this second objective. So let's begin with the industry's quest for truth.

One of the simplest yet wisest descriptions of a reporter's methods was once offered in a story told by the famous and legendarily thorough journalist and biographer Robert Caro. One night, when Caro was a copy boy at his first newspaper job, the editor called him into his office. All the reporters were busy, so the editor wondered if Caro could go to City Hall to cover a city council meeting about a controversial new development.

"Have you ever reported a story for us?" the editor asked.

"No," Caro answered.

"OK, here's what you do," the editor said. "You go down to City Hall and listen for a while until you think you know what's going on. After the meeting, talk to whoever is opposing this plan to find out why. Then you go to the developer to get his side of the story. If you're confused, go back to the opponents and ask more questions. Keep going back and forth until you've figured out the story. Got it?"

Almost all of journalism's sophisticated principles are embodied in this anecdote. And these principles go far beyond today's cliched and vulnerable arguments about balance and objectivity. For instance, when reporters unjustifiably favor one side of a story, when they fail to do their homework or they accept easy, superficial answers, they have skipped an obvious step from Caro's story. But when they push beyond the obvious or the confusing, when they break enlightening new ground or bring down a powerful foe with incontrovertible facts, they have adhered to this basic formula.

The frequency with which today's senior journalists violate this simple lesson constitutes one of the great mysteries of the modern age. In fact, the press' shameful gullibility about the Bush administration's rationale for the Iraq war would have been corrected, in the first month of discussion, if the nation's top correspondents had remembered just a smidgeon of Journalism 101. That they didn't would seem to bolster Gant's case in "We're All Journalists Now:" Journalism is not a "profession" but an "activity," which anyone can do. And we'd all be better off if more people tried their hands at it.

Unfortunately, Gant's argument screams in the face of common sense, for two reasons. First, one could define any profession in such reductionist terms. Carpentry is an activity, too. Would you want your home built by your cousin, whose profession is consulting but who loves woodworking? What about Gant's own profession, the law? Would he want a multimillion-dollar personal-injury claim against him handled by his pal, the dentist? Gant seems to anticipate such analogies: Law and medicine, he maintains, are two professions that deserve their professional status -- and the privileges that professions bestow upon their members. The reason, he says, is that in these fields, "the privilege generally belongs to the client and not the professional." Clearly, Gant intends the word "privilege" in a strictly legal sense, meaning disclosure decisions that only an attorney's client can make. But his discussion stretches the term into its lay usage, where the law's professionals do quite well, thank you.

The second flaw in Gant's argument stems from the unanticipated difficulties being faced right now by the promoters of citizen journalism. This concept -- the reporting of news on the Web by ordinary citizens who are armed with cameras, or laptops, or both -- has obvious appeal. And it has enjoyed a boost from articulate supporters such as Gillmor. Unfortunately, the citizen journalism practitioners -- and their accomplishments -- aren't nearly as numerous as their hyper-visible promoters would have us believe. Furthermore, a good many of the medium's optimistic early experiments, such as Ohmynews.com, have begun stumbling.

The reason should have been obvious. Apparently, it's one thing (a good idea) to use citizen journalists for material from the field, such as on-the-scene accounts from a Hurricane Katrina, or soldier diaries from the trenches of Iraq. It's quite another (a bad idea) to expect amateurs to figure out who is telling the truth about Iraq, or which priests have committed pedophilia. Stories in this latter category obviously require skill in a host of exacting tasks, such as interviewing evasive sources, understanding how and where bureaucracies hide evidence and writing a narrative that is compelling yet properly sourced.

Fortunately, Gant's blind spot on these issues has an obvious answer: standards matter. In every field, standards are devised and continually refined by the profession's senior members. These masters earn their wisdom through years of challenging, often painful experiences. Their duty is to pass on their lessons to up-and-comers, who should serve some demanding period of apprenticeship. This is how every profession achieves its high ideals. In the media's case, those standards involve strong writing, fairness and independence, thoroughness and accuracy, ethics and astute judgment.

The best way to enforce professional standards has always been through some system of credentialism. Such elitism has always been awkward for the press, whose roots were once in the working class. (Even today, when young reporters come looking for jobs, some editors still prefer their degrees to be in street sense rather than journalism.) The challenge for online news bosses, therefore, is to devise a credentialing system that is as good as, preferably better than, what traditional media has employed. This matters today more than ever. By all indications, citizen efforts to broadcast on the Web will not stop, no matter what the Keens of the world say. Every medium's professionals therefore must find ways of dealing with this onslaught thoughtfully.

Many professions, law among them, have handled the credential challenge by adopting some system of self-regulation. Whenever such notions have been advanced for the media, press lords panic and run for cover behind First Amendment excuses. If the courts' increasing restrictions on the media are any guide, however, there may be a limit to how much longer the press can play this game. This is an institution, after all, that prides itself on its royal nickname, the Fourth Estate; that expects, and fights for, a variety of access privileges because its mission is, ostensibly, to serve the public interest; and that bases many of its stories on how other institutions -- government, the military and business, to name just a few -- violate their codes of honor.

We can only hope the digerati will help the news media someday to shed its own double standards. If they do, and adopt a modern and meaningful system of self-regulation, Keen's argument in "The Cult of the Amateur" -- that the Net's citizen journalists are destroying our culture -- will quickly deflate. One suspects Keen knows this. His book reads like an overstuffed opinion column, rushed into print to take advantage of its brief evolutionary moment of opportunity. Some of Keen's arguments actually argue against themselves. He complains, for example, that the product spoofs and marketing exposes proliferating on the Net are compromising "our ability to trust conventional advertising." Thank God.

Even if all these moral issues were resolved, we still would be left with a gaping practical question: How will news producers make money tomorrow, as they increasingly move online? The question leads to another, at the heart of the media's chicken-and-egg dilemma: Is the gradual decline in newspaper readership and network TV viewership forcing big media to make the cruel financial decisions we all read about -- such as laying off reporters and editors, rolling over for advertisers, cutting back on investigative work and other valuable but expensive "products"? Or is big media losing its audience precisely because it's making such choices, which it does to maintain the 25 percent profit margins that were viable only in the pre-digital age? Unfortunately, both scenarios are true. And fortunately, both also miss the real story in new media, which is that morality and money can walk hand in hand.

In a scattering of metropolitan areas, including some of our smallest ones, a few smart newspaper publishers and TV news producers are stepping quite profitably into the digital future. And they're doing so while maintaining, even reviving, traditional journalistic values.

One of the most interesting representatives of this upbeat future is Rob Curley, a frumpy, whiz kid from Lawrence, Kan. Curley, who's in his 30s, is a vice president at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, and he got there by doing journalism the old-fashioned way, with a vengeance -- on the Internet. Curley believes that news should be "hyper local" and that digital media is the ideal tool to make this possible. When covering school sports, for example, many local new media journalists, Curley among them, have had crews shoot video, conduct studio interviews and broadcast constant updates to readers' iPods. "We covered T-ball like it was the Yankees," Curley recently said, during one of the show-and-tells he regularly performs in newsrooms, convention halls and journalism schools around the country.

Curley launched similar stunts when he moved to the sleepy retirement town of Naples, Fla. Before long, the community had a bristling online restaurant guide, complete with discussion boards, daily updates and e-mail reminders. A real estate investigation created an online neighborhood-by-neighborhood database, which readers could sort through themselves. For churchgoers, the paper produced another set of podcasts (soon nicknamed "Godcasts").

To make all this happen, Curley persuaded his publishers to do what most news executives would never dream of: They spent money, aggressively, on their new media divisions. This isn't just about buying fancy computers; they also hired the best people they could find, especially in graphic design. (Most news operations, fearful of new media's continual state of chaos, invest only timidly in their online divisions. That's one reason today's hot computer jocks get their best job offers from outfits like Google and Yahoo.) By the time Curley left Naples, his online news operation was sporting the following tagline: "Why get your news from a newsroom of 8 people when you can get it from a newsroom of 148 people?"

How does a tiny newspaper pay for such an operation? To answer, Curley recalls the day his former publisher told him he had set up appointments with the community's 10 largest businesses. "I want you to come along," the publisher said to Curley. "Bring your laptop, so you can show off all the neat stuff you're building. Then I want you to leave the room while I sell them $1 million ad contracts." And, Curley says, the publisher often made those sales.

The moral in this story should not be news: When a company tries to sustain profits by aggressively cutting costs, especially through heavy layoffs, it can cut out its heart. As the business staggers to recover, it is often leap-frogged by bold newcomers, who may not know the industry's history or appreciate its values. Modern business studies are full of these self-destructive stories, which are always earnestly reported, ironically enough, by the struggling press.

And another irony: It turns out there are huge job opportunities in tomorrow's news operations. No, these aren't calls for bloggers. While a few of the most famous bloggers are (despite Keen's denial) making nice incomes -- from advertising, from their notoriety or from selling their sites -- most are proving to be the digital age's sweatshop workforce: a populous labor pool, content with low wages and highly replaceable. The real unfilled need in new media is for editors. In the digital age, the biggest challenge, for everyone, is to keep up with all the news and other information coming at us online. Above all other industries, the media urgently needs teams of people who can manage today's growing information deluge -- people who can assess the material's worth, synthesize it and turn it into something you and I want to read.